Outsourcing IT services of CAGD won’t solve payroll challenges – Dep Controller

The Controller and Accountant General’s Department has said outsourcing its IT services to private firms is not the solution to the challenges it is facing regarding the processing of the public sector payroll.

Policy Think Tank IMANI Ghana, in a recent statement named the CAGD as one of the worst public institutions in the country in 2014.

A press statement signed by its President Franklin Cudjoe said: “If there were two institutions that had perfected the art of making nonsense of all the reform efforts firmly established by the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission to rein in the haemorrhaging wage bill, it is certainly the Controller and Accountant General’s Department and the National Service Secretariat.”

In IMANI’s view: “Apart from busily padding the ghost pay roll with more ghosts, the CAGD had refused to allow technology, transparent technology to fix the mess in the public payroll.”

It recommended that the IT processes of the Department be outsourced to a private firm to ensure that ghost names and overpayments are stopped.

However, Deputy Controller and Accountant General James Ntim Amponsah told Morning Starr host Kafui Dey on Thursday January 15, 2015 that outsourcing that bit of the CAGD’s payroll processing activities will not resolve the issues raised by the Think Tank.

“It is not the solution to challenges that we are facing,” he stressed.

According to him, the CAGD is already collaborating with the various Government institutions towards solving the payroll challenges.

He said “until you deal with it at the recruitment and input level,” the problem will persist, adding that the Department is partnering with software consultants as well as using electronic pay vouchers to help clean up the public payroll.